2014B Day 19: Stop Breaking MagAO!

So the last two or three nights we’ve been using MagAO at its geometric limits. By that I mean the various angles and rotations and cable contortions that the exciting science targets required. There was a conversation like this last night (accuracy not 100%):

Tonight Jordan flipped our system upside down about 25 times. It’s designed to do this, of course, but it makes for lots of fun keeping all of the precise alignment from primary mirror to secondary mirror, and down the PyWFS optics. Kate did a fantastic job keeping up with all of the camera lens re-alignments and axis changes on the pyramid. Still though, after a couple of nights of defending MagAO from marauding observers I feel a little like Captain Jack:

We forgot to post this last night. Here’s Francois Menard and Jos de Boer with the MagAO team.

Jos, Jared, Francois, Katie, and Kate.

And Jordan hard at work with Clio.

Here’s Jordan formulating his next malicious attempt to destroy MagAO

And our usual assortment of day-in-the-life pretty pictures.

Povilas and Francesco gave the DIMM (the seeing monitor) a little T.L.C. at sunset. (P is waving)Kate took this panorama on her walk tonight.This is just after last night’s epic green flash. It think it’s because it was behind the peak, so it was well above the marine haze.

I had some good metal picked out for tonight, but I think we need to just relax a little. Here you go.